Bankers On The Bottom, Promoters On Top

While it's quite obvious that former Wall-Streeters are no longer endowing nightlife with their hard-earned and highly-leveraged funny money, the more interesting question is: how many people inside the likes of 1Oak, Tenjune, Bijoux, Greenhouse, etc., are now actually paying? It seems the few people who can actually "afford" to be popping bottles as of late are the same ilk who never had to pay in the first place--the promoters, model wranglers and their captives girls. Unless they're paying for the company they keep (ahem)... these guys might be the only ones who still get to live large for...not much.

So if you've ever wondered about that table full of tall female bags-of-bones and grungy guys with skull necklaces who don't look like they are rolling into John Pierpoint Morgan in the morning, these are the guys who are getting comped. Bottles in the eyes of promoters are fungible goods, readily substituted for cash. If club provides promoter with bottles, promoter provides club with girls, and this in turn entices actual buyers.

The problem for clubs is that actual buyers are actually drying up. But promoters are still able to get bottles, (albeit at the cost of their time), and have surpassed many of the other big ballers in terms of living large. In fact, so much so that they seem to have literally inundated clubs as of late, making one wonder if even a small fraction of the people inside are paying serious coin. These days numbers alone inside a club won't necessarily indicate financial health.